Mission Jaguar Read online

  Mission Jaguar

  A Beck Granger Adventure

  Bear Grylls

  About the Author

  Bear Grylls has become known around the world as one of the most recognised faces of survival and outdoor adventure. His journey to this acclaim started in the UK, where his late father taught him to climb and sail.

  Trained from a young age in martial arts, Bear went on to spend three years as a soldier in the British Special Forces, serving with 21 SAS. It was here that he perfected many of the skills that his fans all over the world enjoy watching him pit against mother-nature.

  His popular survival TV shows include ‘Man Vs Wild’ and ‘Born Survivor’ which became one of the most watched programmes on the planet with an estimated audience of 1.2 billion. He has also hosted the hit adventure show 'Running Wild' on NBC, where he takes some of the world's best known movie stars on incredible adventures. Most recently US President Barrack Obama asked to appear on the show for a worldwide ‘Running Wild Special’.

  Bear is currently the youngest ever Chief Scout to the UK Scout Association and is an honorary Colonel to the Royal Marine Commandos.

  He has authored 22 books, including the international number one Bestselling autobiography: Mud, Sweat & Tears and his hugely popular titles Survival Guide for Life and True Grit, a bestselling novel Ghost Flight and his Mission Survival fiction books which have sold over 4 million copies in China alone.

  * * *

  If you’d like to know more, please visit Bear’s website, www.beargrylls.com where you can sign up for his most recent news.

  Also by Bear Grylls

  Mission Typhoon

  Mission Dragon

  Mission Raptor

  Mission Jaguar

  Mission Jaguar

  Bear Grylls

  This edition published in 2016 by Ipso Books

  Agora Books is a division of Peters Fraser + Dunlop Ltd

  55 New Oxford Street, London WC1A 1BS

  Copyright © Bear Grylls, 2016

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  To all budding young Royal Marine Commandos:

  May your love of adventure inspire you always to go the extra mile.

  Character Profiles

  Beck Granger

  Beck Granger is just fourteen but knows more about the art of survival than most adults learn in a lifetime. As a small child, he picked up many traditional survival skills from the remote tribes around the world that his parents stayed with in their work for Green Force. Since then he has practiced and polished his abilities in tropical jungles, arid deserts and frozen wastes all over the globe.

  Dian Granger / Anita Valcarcel

  Dian has lived her whole life believing herself to be Anita, the daughter of a man she despises and who treats her as his property. Pampered from head to toe so long as she never steps out of line, and punished ruthlessly if she does, she wants nothing more than to get away. Even if she lacks the skills to make an escape, the courage and tenacity she inherited from her unknown birth family means that she will never give up trying.

  James Blake

  James is a year older than Beck and a fellow orphan, though for very different reasons. His mother killed Beck’s parents, and even though James has firmly turned his back on that side of the family he will always feel guilty on Beck’s behalf. Even though the family business has made him very rich, as far as he is concerned his true wealth is his friends, and there is nothing he won’t do for them. A lot of people think James is an idiot. He finds it very useful when they make that mistake.

  Ric Valcarcel

  Ric Valcarcel is rich and powerful and he makes sure everyone knows it. What he wants, he gets. What he has, he keeps. Once he has set his mind on something, he will eliminate any obstacle that gets in his way. It doesn’t matter if that obstacle is people. Ric gets his way. Always.

  Chapter One

  The rain forest’s steam-bath humidity wasn’t meant for running in, but the dark-haired girl stepped up her pace as she pushed her way through the undergrowth, not minding the sharp leaves that scratched at her face. Male voices were shouting through the trees behind her but she had vowed she wasn’t going back. Not this time. Not ever again.

  She knew she was heading straight for the cliff, a sheer limestone wall twenty metres high blocking her way, and they probably thought they had her cornered. But even though they might be old and unfit, she wasn’t. She could take it. Grab the cache, scale the cliff, and leave them behind.

  And then she would be alone in the jungle. She knew it would be hard, and she may not make it out alive, but even if she was never seen again, even if she ended up jaguar food with her bones picked clean by soldier ants, she would die free. Her last, final act of defiance …

  Something grasped her foot and held it like a trap. She gasped as the rest of her kept moving, straight down into the jungle floor, ploughing into the mass of rotten leaves and damp soil.

  “No!” She shouted it, angrily, spitting out a mouthful of mulch. She tried to jerk her leg free and winced as a jab of pain shot through her muscles. A sprain could change everything. She could see the culprit — a vine like a steel wire wrapped around her foot. She had to sit up and twist around and work it free with her fingers — just kicking only made the wire tighter.

  She could hear the pursuit getting closer. The shouts had stopped but she could hear the movement. And her headlong blundering had just opened up a path through the undergrowth. If she was going to get away it had to be now.

  “Hey, I think she’s stopped …”

  They were almost on top of her. She pulled her foot free, leapt up and started running again, all in one movement. Something like a red hot needle seemed to stick into her ankle joint. She would never make it to the cliff before they got to her. She could hear them, only metres away.

  Tears swam in her eyes but she wasn’t giving up. Her fingers closed accidentally around a loose branch and she thought, well, why not? Time to make a last stand. She wasn’t going back.

  The first of them burst out of the undergrowth and she swung the branch at him. Only his very fast reactions stopped her from knocking his head off. He stopped dead, tilting right over backwards, feet skidding in the dead leaves to avoid the blow.

  “Woah! What are you doing? It’s me!”

  And then he staggered forward as someone else cannoned into him from behind, caught out by his sudden stop.

  They weren’t who she had been expecting at all. They weren’t Silvio or any of her father’s goons. Just a pair of teenage boys — and she knew one of them. The taller, fair haired one.

  “I can see that!” she hissed. “What are you doing? And who are you?”

  She said that last bit to the second boy as he emerged from behind the first. He was staring at her like she was from outer space. His face was obscured with muddy patterns like some kind of jungle guerrilla, but still he seemed kind of familiar, for about half a second, before her conscious mind told her she had never seen him before in her life. He was a little shorter than the blond one, dark haired, with a wiry figure that, unlike the other boy’s, seemed to know exactly what it was doing with every movement.

  Apart from his mouth, which didn’t seem capable of movement at all.

  “Oh, ignore him,” the first boy said dismissively after they had stared at each o
ther for a couple of seconds. “He’ll get over it. What are you doing? I told you to stay put!”

  “And I told you, idiot! I’m escaping!”

  “Oh.” He looked nonplussed, then very pleased with himself. “Well, you don’t have to anymore you see, ‘cos we’re rescuing you.”

  An alarm bell chose that exact moment to start ringing through the jungle. She watched his face fall.

  Brilliant. Just brilliant. The one thing she hadn’t wanted — the whole hornet’s nest stirred up.

  “Yeah?” she demanded. “So, how’s that going?”

  Chapter Two

  Beck’s story. Three weeks earlier …

  Beck Granger had to resist the urge to stroke the dog. It was a black haired Labrador on a leash that sniffed all around him while he sat poised in a metal chair — up and down his legs, around his waist, and with especial attention to his pockets.

  He wondered how often the dog actually found drugs, which was what it was sniffing for.

  “Hello doggy,” said James Blake’s voice from the chair behind him. It was immediately followed by the dog handler, a stern and firm man in a prison officer’s uniform and with a strong Essex accent.

  “Don’t touch the dog, sir.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  Beck was given the all clear and told to go and stand in the next queue. The people ahead of him were having their fingers swabbed by more prison officers, and the swabs were being fed into a machine which took a few seconds to scan for traces of amphetamines. Behind him, Beck’s Uncle Al — a stout, balding man in his sixties — and another prison visitor took their places in the chairs for their turn at receiving the attentions of the sniffer dogs, while James, a lanky, fair haired lad, came to stand with Beck.

  “I couldn’t help it,” James protested at the look Beck gave him. “It’s so cute.”

  The dogs were about the only cute thing Beck could see. He, James, Al and about thirty other people queued in a bleak concrete tunnel as they worked their way through the different layers of prison security. It was the first time Beck had ever been somewhere like this and he couldn’t help scanning the other visitors with interest.

  He and James were the youngest there, apart from a couple of babies being carried. The rest were anything from their twenties up to pensioners, men and women, smartly and cheaply dressed — and anywhere in between. Some chatted between themselves, some were obviously friends or family visiting together, some just kept quiet like they were hoping no one would notice them.

  But the one thing they all had in common, he thought, was that they were free. Any of them could just turn around and walk back down the tunnel, and they would be back outside and beyond the security perimeter. Unlike the people they had come to visit.

  Al came to join them.

  “I did tell you about the dog,” he muttered.

  “Yeah, but it’s cute,” Beck said with a grin, mimicking James’s voice. Al rolled his eyes and studiously looked elsewhere. He had never made any secret of the fact that he didn’t approve of James. At all. It was because of James that Beck had once faked his own death, leading to unimaginable heartbreak for Al who had raised Beck since he was a small child. But James was used to tuning out other people’s feelings, so he hardly seemed to notice what Al thought.

  When Beck had first met James, the other boy had been in a bad place. He had been all set to follow in the footsteps of his mother, a professional killer. He had little way of knowing anything else. Beck had been able to befriend him and help him find a better way to live.

  James had been so happy when Beck had recently approached him for his help, even though it took him about half a second to work out that Beck had come to him in particular for a reason. James had inherited a fortune, and what Beck and Al wanted would cost money, lots of it.

  They all passed the amphetamine test and waited by the double doors for the last stage. A guard with a clipboard took their names.

  “Table thirteen, sir,” he told Al. And they pushed their way through into the visiting area.

  It was the size of a school gym, and built like one, with bare brick walls and metal rafters. Rows of tables were laid out and the buzz of conversation filled the space. Uniformed guards circulated slowly, ready to pounce if they saw any physical contact between prisoners and visitors, or anything more substantial than a sheet of paper being passed over.

  Each table had a single chair on one side and two or three on the other. They sat themselves at table number thirteen and waited. Two minutes later Beck felt his breath catch in his throat as the man they had come to see walked through a door at the far end of the room.

  Of all the people still living on the planet, this was the one he had the most reason to loathe.

  Chapter Three

  Dr Henry Winslow was a tall, balding man who had never smiled much even when he had been free. He was wearing the standard prison uniform of sweatpants and a t-shirt as he came forward and sat down heavily. Ignoring Beck completely, he looked at Al and jerked a thumb at James. “Who’s this one?”

  “Oh, don’t mind me,” James said casually.

  “I won’t.”

  Beck continued to stare at him through narrowed eyes. He was glad Winslow wasn’t talking to him because he didn’t trust himself to speak coherently back.

  Beck had spent fourteen years believing his twin sister Dian had died at the age of one day, following a difficult birth. Then he had learned that in fact Winslow, the doctor overseeing the birth, had taken this helpless, brand new little human being, and traded her for cash like a goldfish at a fair.

  The details that came out with Winslow’s confession had been staggering. Apparently, there had just been time for a photo of Beck and Dian with their parents. Then both babies had been whisked away to be put in incubators, with round-the-clock medical supervision. They had only had a 50/50 chance of surviving.

  At the same time, another mother in the hospital hadn’t been so lucky. Her child really had been lost. So, Winslow had told Beck’s parents that Dian had also passed away. Of course, they wanted to say goodbye to their little girl — and they were shown the other baby, who was then taken away for cremation. The other mother had already said her farewells. Both Beck’s mother and the other mother had been given urns of ashes to be buried in the hospital’s memorial garden, but only one of the urns was real.

  Recently, Beck had started waking from nightmares where he was the one being stolen. It left Beck rattled and scared — but also angry. He wanted retribution.

  Dian had only been the first of many children that Winslow had smuggled to paying customers. He specialised in crooked adoption agencies which turned a blind eye to the proper procedures and didn’t ask where the children had come from. Beck had friends who were adopted. A woman in Sweden who had been adopted had told him that it was such a wonderful thing, bringing happiness to children and to parents who otherwise wouldn’t have each other. Someone like Winslow was like a worm in an apple, corrupting something pure and beautiful.

  “How’s prison?” Al asked. Winslow glared at him through narrowed eyes.

  “How do you think? You do know these places are designed for punishment, don’t you? Well, it’s working. And for all the help I’ve given the authorities — I’ve told them everything, everything! — yet for all that, I’m still expecting the full sentence. Sixteen years.” He shook his head angrily. “I’m a trained doctor, I’ve saved lives, but I get sixteen years inside as reward for a lifetime of service.”

  The sheer hypocritical self-pity from a man who had preyed on human misery made Beck want to gag.

  “You’ve certainly been very helpful,” Al agreed, poker-faced. “Of course, you haven’t told them absolutely everything.”

  Winslow’s face turned to stone.

  “I’ve told them everything I remember.”

  “Which is a great deal, over a career stretching fourteen years. What a shame you can’t quite remember the details of the very first baby you too
k.”

  Winslow stared up at the ceiling.

  “Yes. Isn’t it.”

  “So, we are here to ask …” Al coughed, and his expression suggested there was a very nasty taste in his mouth. “What would help you remember? What could we …”

  “Nothing.” Winslow swung his hate-filled gaze down at him. “There is absolutely nothing you could ever do. Because I will not give …” He jerked his head at Beck, still without looking at him. Apparently he couldn’t even say Beck’s name. “… you, the satisfaction.” He was now staring at Beck. “You got me in here. You want to know where your sister is? Well, you can spend a lifetime finding out.”

  “Even if that final little detail made the difference between sixteen years and, say, ten? Most of them in an open prison?” Al asked.

  Winslow looked sideways at him, eyes narrowed in suspicion.

  “It wouldn’t. I’ve been told this is as good as it gets — unless I start splashing out on a very expensive barrister. Which I can’t afford.”

  “We’ve been talking to a very expensive barrister and he is confident he can do what I just described.”

  Al sighed, then ducked his head at James.

  “Over to you,” he said without expression.

  James leaned his elbows on the table and gave Winslow his friendliest smile.

  “Hi,” he said. “James Blake.”

  Winslow cocked his head in thought.

  “I remember you from the news. The Lumos boy.”

  “That’s me.”